At Cohesive, we want to make sure that our clients have cohesive websites that load as fast as possible. There are a few reasons why you need to test your website speed and make sure that your site is loading fast:

How A Web Performance Test Can Affect Visitor Retention or Conversion Rates

Your website visitors (who are mostly potential clients) will not stay around waiting for a website to load. There are plenty of other fast-loading website out there the serve up the same information, products and services. To make sure that your competition doesn't capture your customers, make sure you don't give them a reason to leave your website.

Search engine optimization isn't just about optimize everything on a page such as meta tags and image alt tags. You should also pay attention to the off-site elements such as site load time. Google does. Google actually factors in site speed in the ranking equation and, all things equal, if your competitors site loads faster...they will probably rank higher than you in the search engines.

How A Web Performance Test Can Generate More Revenue

If you are selling products online, the difference in a sale on your website could simply be 0.5 seconds in load time. A while back, Marissa Mayer of Google shared some very compelling research results at a Web 2.0 conference. In essence, she stated that an additional delay of 0.5 seconds to page-load time caused a 20% drop in traffic. Think about 20% less customers and 20% less sales. It makes a difference.

What is the best tool to test my website's performance?

Pingdom Tools Website Speed Test

Website Speed Test Feature Overview

-Examine all parts of a web page -- View file sizes, load times, and other details about every single element of a web page (HTML, JavaScript and CSS files, images, etc.). You can sort and filter this list in different ways to identify performance bottlenecks.-Web Performance overview -- We automatically put together plenty of performance-related statistics for you based on the test result-Web Performance grade and tips -- See how your website conforms to performance best practices from Google Page Speed (similar to Yahoo's Yslow). You can get some great tips on how to speed up your website this way.-Trace your performance history -- We save each test for you so you can review it later and also see how things change over time (with pretty charts!).-Test from multiple locations -- See how fast a website loads in Europe, the United States, etc.-Share your results -- We've made it easy for you to perform a test and share it with your friends, work colleagues or web host.

How The Web Performance Test Works

All tests are done with real web browsers, so the results match the end-user experience exactly. We use a bunch of instances of Google's Chrome web browser to load websites, record performance data, and so on. Test your site speed from dedicated Pingdom servers.

GTMetrix - Website Speed and Performance Optimization

GTMetrix is one of our favorite tools at Cohesive. It will highlight the goods and bads of your site and server performance so that you can really focus in on the problematic areas.

Test your site speed right now with GTMetrix.

Wrapping It Up

From Google to visitors to sales, it is more important than you think to pay attention to your site performance. Make sure that you take 3 minutes and conduct a web performance test as quickly as you can.